Callahan had a big hand in sealing his own defeat

David Steele

Published 4:00 am, Monday, December 29, 2003

2003-12-29 04:00:00 PDT San Diego -- That was no way for the coach of the defending AFC champions to go out.

On a Sunday afternoon he can only hope he'll soon forget, Bill Callahan was soundly beaten in a game that was far more lopsided than the final score indicated. He was reduced to desperate stabs at authority and discipline that would have been more effective and made more sense back when the season still meant something. He was belittled by many in his locker room, meekly defended by others, openly revolted against by others still.

And, from the looks of it all, he deserved every last ounce of it.

The Raiders hit depths they never knew existed Sunday against the Chargers, and if Callahan did anything to drag his team out of it, it wasn't obvious. Everything that fed the utter chaos that was the season finale against the Chargers, Callahan had a hand in. The more that came out about the events of the previous night and the morning of the game, the more they painted a picture of a coach that had lost control of his roster and every last trace of respect from his players.

When a key veteran (Tim Brown, to be exact) is moved to say, "We were on the sidelines saying, 'Do we have a pilot for "Playmakers" going on here?'," you know your season is stinking it up at a historic level. The Raiders have had some bad years, particularly the ones bridging the L.A. and second Oakland eras, but few have ended with the anarchy that took hold Sunday.

Callahan's 11th-hour suspensions of Charles Woodson and Charlie Garner for a curfew violation -- as the two were getting dressed to play, by all accounts -- looked on the surface like an equally 11th-hour stab at restoring order, or his reputation, or something that would make the season and his tenure look less like a joke.

One didn't have to peel back much of that veneer, however, to unmask it as a move that was far too little and exceedingly too late -- to save the season or to save his job. If Callahan was trying to put his foot down and establish some semblance of order, Week 17 of the most godawful season in franchise history was a mighty strange time to try it.

It came off as petty and vindictive, traits that didn't seem apparent throughout his engineering of the Raiders through the ups and downs of last year's Super Bowl run. It also came off as hypocritical -- if this was a move to re-establish authority, it ended up revealing that his authority had evaporated long ago with few consequences and little repercussions.

The sad thing is that for a good part of the season, it looked as if the Raiders' epic collapse was a function strictly of aging, injured or undertalented players. The Callahan factor, though, forced its way into the picture more and more as the season wore on. As many a player hinted Sunday afternoon, the right coach could make things better, and could have made things better this season. This coach was not making things better.

The proof was before everyone's eyes Sunday at Qualcomm. Most prominent was the absence of arguably the most important players on either side of the ball, for reasons that cast blame on them, but also on the man exerting the discipline on them. The rest of the players, though, hardly covered themselves with glory.

To their credit, they were in the game until the end. On the other hand, they did everything they could to make sure they never actually had a chance to win, from showing off ineptitude in every phase on offense to egregious violations of tackling fundamentals nearly every time LaDainian Tomlinson touched the ball, to penalties that either ground their drives to a halt or injected life into the Chargers'.

Yet here, now, at this time, in this way, Callahan is putting his foot down? This is where he's planting his feet and taking a stand -- against a player who went virtually unpunished and practically unspoken-to after a blistering verbal assault on his coach two months earlier, back when the season was only beginning to spiral out of control?

Of course, Callahan's not speaking to Woodson for several days after the late-October diatribe only underscored Woodson's core accusation -- that the coach was a poor communicator. Much like Callahan's infamous comment a month later, about the Raiders being "the dumbest team in America" only underscored his inability to get the team playing smarter long before he was moved to point out their lack of intelligence.

You've got to think all the events of Sunday could have been avoided: the suspensions, the hard feelings, the players' desire to get the hell out of town ASAP, the way they still, at times, played like at least a top-five "dumbest" team.

If Callahan didn't start the snowball of this season rolling downhill, he did little to stop it. That's a huge part of what his job requires. It's a huge part of what he appears to have failed to do. The result was on full, ugly display on the field and in the locker room Sunday.

It's a shame that it likely will be the image with which he leaves the Raiders.